Penthouse's Female CEO Has No Plan to Ditch Full-Page Nudes

Earlier this year, the Penthouse brand was taken over by an unusual character: Kelly Holland, a woman and self-declared "left-leaning feminist."

Holland joined the company 10 years ago, four decades after Penthouse magazine was founded as the more sexually explicit competitor to Playboy. Hired to create adult films, Holland moved up to managing director of broadcast, and then spent nearly three years and all her savings to buy out the floundering brand. The deal closed in early 2016. Now, the magazine, which had been operating at a $3 million yearly loss, is on track to yield a small profit, in part because Holland started outsourcing its production.

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Kelly Holland, CEO of Penthouse.

Holland was a largely apolitical, Reagan-voting, aspiring actress in 1980s Los Angeles when she turned to documentary filmmaking, which lead her to directing a porn movie, which primed her to make a documentary about the porn world. She was surprised to find the work of its actresses was consistent with her own feminism: "My body, my rules."

In the muckraking style of old Penthouse, Holland started commissioning more ambitious journalism, including political pieces like one linking Donald Trump to Putin that infuriated Trump-supporting readers. But beautiful, naked women are still most important to the brand's identity. Unlike Playboy, which declared full nudes "passe" in the age of free online porn, Penthouse remains committed to nudity—to a degree.

Holland spoke to Esquire about the endurance of quality print porn, feminism, and the essence of sexuality.

ESQ: I read someplace that early on, you worked for Pat Robertson's The 700 Club?

Holland: Pat Robertson had several stations and one of those was in Dallas. I walked in and the chief engineer hired me. I promptly quit college. We had an hour and a half for lunch every day, but half an hour of that was a prayer meeting. About once a month, the general manager would say, "Kelly, the Lord has impressed upon me that he wants you to come to the prayer meeting." And I would say, "Really, Harold? Because the Lord has impressed upon me that he wants me sit here and listen to Pink Floyd."

At some point I quit, I came to L.A., and I did theater. Then I had this bizarre moment where I had the opportunity to work on a documentary. There was a priest who was raising money and awareness for a peace march that was going to go from Panama to Mexico City. At the time, dirty wars were raging across Central America.

And that was the point at which you had what you've called a "political awakening."

It was an epiphany. It was my first time in countries in civil wars, my first time in countries with crushing poverty. It changed my thinking. I came back to the United States, I scraped together a little money, I bought an edit bay, and I started taking on a variety of work. Now I'm a born-again leftist, right? I had a business model: take commercial projects during the day, but make the facility available at night for worthwhile projects, whether those are student films or documentaries or social justice pieces.

"Now I'm a born-again leftist, right?"

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So you're running this edit bay and renting it out—

Then into my editing bay came this adult company called Vivid. They had some technical problem, and I had to walk in and look at all the monitors. I'm liberal. I said, "Oh! Okay." That opened up an entire conversation that escalated to the owner of the company and his sister. I said something about one of her movies, and she said, "You think you could do better?" I said, "Well, yeah, actually I do."

I probably would not have stayed in the business had I not done the documentary [on the porn industry]. Once I started interviewing women in the adult industry and understanding how cliché-defying their stories were, that's when I got interested. A good percentage of them were incredibly articulate—they were the kids that dropped out of school because they were too smart to sit still. They were the radicals, the renegades. I have experienced it in my 20 years where I felt there was a woman being exploited. Excluding those two occasions, I have not seen the cliché.

I've been on debate panels with anti-porn feminists, I've been in conversations with religious people who have strong issues with pornography, and they'll always throw out, "But what about this? What about that? I know there was a movie where a girl's head was shoved in a toilet!" I say, "Listen, are you going to go ask Dan Rather to justify Jerry Springer?" I speak for what I do.

You've said there's "an enormous amount of misogynist crap" in this business. What distinguishes something exploitative from something empowering?

Holland at a Penthouse event in 2010.

Getty Images

I think it can most clearly be defined by the person that I told to leave the set one time, and I paid her. I was shooting for someone and a girl showed up. You could tell she was uncomfortable, and she said very early on, "Will I be paid immediately, will I be paid cash?" I was a cameraman and she was getting into makeup, so I started talking to her. It turned out her husband and her relatively young child were outside in a car, and she was waiting to be paid because she had to go buy diapers. I said, "This isn't working for me." I went to the director. She was going to make $800 that day. I said, "I'll pay her $800 just to leave. You can split that with me, and we'll go on to work together in the future." The director and I gave her the money in cash and she left.

How are women portrayed? This gets very complicated. I have done fetish pieces where women were tied up with silk around their wrists. I did a visually great piece where a woman was in a cage, and she came out and drank milk out of a bowl like a cat. I thought it was hot, so if it turns me on, I'm all about that. Is that an abrogation of feminist thinking if a woman is turned on by putting herself in a submissive situation? I don't think so. I don't want to get deeply into a conversation about my personal life, but I'm a CEO, and you don't get where you get without being a bit of a bitch on the way up, but that's not my preference in my personal life. Sometimes in your sexual fantasies you want to take a different tack. If a woman is degraded at the hands of a man and it appears to be true, whether it's true on-set or not—if there is the illusion that he is degrading her—I won't do it.

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Did I do a nun and priest scene? Oh yeah, because I'm Catholic. Would I do a girl in a burka and a Jewish orthodox guy? Probably, if I wouldn't get a fatwa of some sort put out on me. I just love dealing with taboos.

How are you bringing your personal views on porn and feminism to Penthouse?

There's been some subtle—or not-so-subtle—changes. Prior to the acquisition, there would be these big gynecological shots where women would put their fingers between their legs, they'd spread their genitals, they'd have insertion. That did not seem to be necessary or consistent with the core history of the magazine, and it seemed to be irrelevant in my commitment to just present beautiful nude women. Was I going to take vaginas out of the magazine? No, I wasn't. This is a political issue for me. You can show all kinds of things, but God help you if you show the vagina. I didn't think that you needed to have an up-close spread shot that went halfway up her uterine canal—this gynecological thing is not the essence of sensuality and sexuality.

"You can show all kinds of things, but God help you if you show the vagina."

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"Objectified" is a weird word. Most women would want to be the object of someone's desire. There's a difference between objectifying women as soulless vessels to be dehumanized in a sex act and being the object of a man's desire.

There's this idea that when there's lots of free online porn, it must be really hard to make money in print porn. But you've said this is isn't the case.

No. The Playboy thing? The bunny committing suicide is my opinion of it. The common belief, and it's been perpetuated by the press, is that free porn has killed porn. Why would anybody pay for anything if they could get it for free? My reply is that free porn has killed free porn. It is this huge fetid pool of content; 99 percent of it not good.

I understand that in the magazine, you're trying to take on more social and political issues.

The first one that we got really political on was kind of handed to us by Utah. Utah declared porn to be a threat to public health and safety and wanted to regulate it as such. And we found that Utah has the fourth highest rate of suicide in the country. They [have problems with] every nasty thing on the planet like child abuse, aggravated sexual assault. So we decided to do a piece where we declared: "We're going to tell you why Utah is a threat to public health and safety." The cover was "Utah's Governor wants to handle your penis." We want to get back to what was the best of our DNA.

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